readability

this was way fun. click and try.

the blog readability test answers the question "what level of education is required to understand your blog?"

i'd start a revolution if i could get up in the morning

what an awesome name for an album!

southern romance

i've just watched elizabethtown for maybe the 10th time (thank god for dvd) and as usual i crave alt-country. i love this movie. it makes me wanna go to kentucky (!) and fall in love with kirsten dunst too! the connection between orlando and kirsten is really great and believable and sweet. and i love the fact that there's so much music in it, and that kirsten's character makes the most awesome road map with soundtrack and everything. i wanna do that too!

it's weird cos before i was sucked into cameron crowe's universe (read: almost famous and elizabethtown), alt-country wasn't really something i did, you know. (on a side-note mr crowe's also responsible for the fact that i, despite years of not understanding my father's love for him, now also listen to elton john.) i didn't do alt-country, i just listened to sheryl crow. (she did make an awesome cover of guns n' roses' sweet child o' mine btw).

the soundtrack to elizabethtown is awesome (both of them actually). it has tom petty, elton john, patty griffin, my morning jacket, ryan adams. i especially love patty griffin. the song on the soundtrack alone made me buy her album and it's really great (well, except for the strange 5 minute long tango song in spanish at the end). her voice touches my heart.

the hard thing about liking alt-country, i've noticed, is that i don't know anything about it. i have a few friends who's into it, but it's not really what i mean, it's more that i'm used to having the references, of knowing the story, the big guys, but here, on the country side of things, i don't. i don't know what's authentic and what's not. well. i know elton john's country-ish album is a fake, cos british homosexuals aren't really country are they. but it still has some really great song on it though.

i guess i'm used to knowing what is cool and what's not. not that i by default choose the former, but it still feels good to know. you know.

on tool

tool (official, wikipedia) is one of my favorite bands and has been for years. i started listening to them through a friend i made in high school, whom i've by now grown apart from and lost contact with, and who was equally into nine inch nails, pearl jam and alice in chains around that time.

we're talking around 96-97, their album aenima was recently released and i heard it at my friends place and liked it well enough to borrow it and tape it. it wasn't until a couple of years later that i grew to love it like a part of my own body. once that happened i remember listening to it again and again, loud!, and actually feeling the changes in mood and rhythm in my heart. and i still do. it's a very emotional album and, while not as focused perhaps as their two later albums but, artistic.

i'm not a great authority on technicalities in music (read: like my dear friend dave) which makes it hard for me to explain its effect on me, but tool has, unlike any band in the genre, an artistic element to their music, and with that i don't mean lyrics and artsy stuff that other bands indeed have, but the music itself. their albums sounds like a beautiful painting, or even a perfect brush stroke of thick paint. it's as if the intensity of the music follows an emotional pattern, something that i can really relate to.

the singer, maynard keenan, makes it perfect. he has a range of voice from soft whispers to full screaming that sounds good! he both sings and screams with emotion and his voice can make me both cry and scream. they way he sings them, he can pull of songs like hooker with a penis, dealing with a poser that's made him angry for criticizing them for selling out - that would make any other singer sound obnoxious and even embarrassing, sounding genuine, at the same time make songs like pushit, dealing with the emotional backlash of loving a dependent (i think, could be both related to depression and drugs too), sound so emotional it gives me real angst listening to it.

from toolband.com

everything just comes together great; the music, the lyrics and maynard's voice. this goes for their live performances as well. i've seen them twice (at roskilde festival '01 and '06) and the first show was as close to having a religious experience as i've ever came, in the sense that i experienced something that i can't explain, something that made me - for lack of a better word - high. next to the above mentioned elements of their music, the visual impression took it a step further and it was truly an extraordinary experience.

the two later albums; lateralus and 10,000 days, is even more conceptual. the lyrics seems to go together in obvious as well as non-obvious ways. the music moves in cycles almost, where you recognizes things here and there and it takes quite a few times listening to the albums to make out the pattern. also, listening to tool is listening to albums, not songs, because if you split the albums and listen only to the songs randomly you'll be missing so much. listening to one song by tool is like watching only 15 minutes in the middle of a film.

generally i think you can say that tool demands a bit more from their audience than your average band and i know i'm not the only one with this opinion. i know i've read before that, like reading literature or watching movies with lots of references makes you feel smart and involved when you get the references - especially the obscure ones; tool makes its audience feel smart and involved, and i agree. because the effort pays off! there are hidden aspects to their music that you can't find the first or second time you listen to their albums. but once you do, it stays with you.

open minded

You Are 68% Open Minded

You are a very open minded person, but you're also well grounded. Tolerant and flexible, you appreciate most lifestyles and viewpoints. But you also know where you stand firm, and you can draw that line. You're open to considering every possibility - but in the end, you stand true to yourself.

How Open Minded Are You?

sugar level: high

i love birthdays! when it's your birthday, everybody loves you, and i think that's great.


sister and lars and myself had a mini-party with chocolate cupcakes and cake. yum! and i got presents! books i wanted, and a great cd, and a round thick candle. i love to burn candles, and they smell great!


i'm getting a global knife from my parents (this one). they are the greatest knives ever, ones you've gotten used to using them you don't ever want to use other knives, i promise. however, they're a bit pricey, but that's what parents are for, right? :)

it's been a good day, and now i'm tired.

twenty-nine

november 14, 1978 at 10.19 CET. that's when i poked my head out into the world. time flies.

on piracy

wow. i just finished reading a loooong post about piracy and the music industry;

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

read it! it's awesome. it's long but so worth the time. i don't know how to review it right now (and i'm hungry!) so just go there and read it first and you'll get my thoughts in it later.

old times

i was digging through old links and found these two pages, fantastic in different ways, and both funny as hell.

the music nerd test, mostly for contemporary/modern music fans though (sorry dave, but give it a shot!), at which i scored "54.34783% - Super Music Nerd". part of me wants to score higher, but parts of me realizes that i'm still not socially inept so scoring somewhat high but not, you know, HIGH is actually a good thing. the girl who's created the test, and the site, has the good taste to really like douglas coupland (url is couplandesque.net) and it's from her i learned that the word couplandesque is actually used! i love coupland's books, but that's for another entry.

a person paper on purity of language is a great satirical text dealing with inconsistencies, prejudice and bias in the english language. to make a point about how excluding expressions and grammatical rules are for women he exchanges women for blacks and men for whites and the effect is obvious. one thing that's really great is that he uses the same argument as the defenders of the generic he does (i've read a lot of texts about that..) which only makes me think less of it (not the text that is). i found it while studying english linguistics a few years ago and doing a thesis on language and gender. it's a great read; eyeopening and funny, and not just for language geeks such as myself.

welcome to scotland

so, me and lars went to glasgow for a week and in retrospect, maybe late october/early november wasn't the best season to visit scotland, but we did it and we liked it. we made these observations on scots

1. they are friendly
2. half of the time even people with good knowledge in the english language (read us and the foreigners we talked to over there) can't understand a word they're saying
3. they don't seem to mind the constant raining


we lived in a backpackers hostel owned by a crazy canadian who, during our stay, celebrated his 40th birthday, but you couldn't really tell if he's really 40 or if he's 15. the people working there, mostly girls 20-25, backpackers themselves, were friendly and helpful. we stayed in a 14 bed dorm, the cheapest, for a full week. now we know that's too long. the other guests came and went, most quiet and harmless but some annoying. i wouldn't mind staying at hostels in the future but it had its drawbacks.

most of the time we spent walking around town or in the park, going through bookstores and drinking coffee at starbucks. we also hit a few museums. i loved the bookstores cos they were filled with fiction in english (!), a luxury here. mailorder aside there's no real place to go through shelves with fiction written in english here. i bought 4, too few, but it's not like i'm rich.. the two newest couplands, the virgin suicides and one i really liked, the bitch goddess notebook.

starbucks got a lot of our money though. i got hooked last year when i was in edinburgh, and lars joined in after his second cup. there is no starbucks in sweden.. :( the white moccas after a long day of walking around town getting sore feet is like heaven.

bagpipe players in front of the royal concert hall

i found the record store avalanche - also in edinburgh, where i spent £50 last year - in glasgow and found a few cds i really like, some belly singles and hope sandoval and the warm intentions. the best thing about the store is that they have great music, and it's not expensive. the record stores here with the best music tends to be the most expensive ones..

we also went to edinburgh one day, and it was as beautiful as i remembered it. the old buildings, the narrow streets in the old town, the castle. we even had some fish & chips there on the royal mile. we spent some time and money in the avalanche store there but mostly we just walked around. we took the train back to glasgow with sore feet and marks&spencers sandwiches.

the royal mile

the canadian's birthday party was on a friday and we joined in, we didn't plan to but we did. and it was fun. a lot of the guests were there, and the staff and some of his friends, and we talked to a lot of them, especially two american guys studying in london and two canadians who were friends of the owner. the american guys were fun and we talked a lot about politics actually - they were torn between our interesting conversation and the two pretty german girls who they tried impress by joking about the holocaust, no it didn't work, surprise. i was however surprised i wasn't more drunk considering how many beer i had that night, but except for running to the bathroom at least 6 times during the night i was fine.

we took almost 300 photos, mostly buildings (my fault), and i really don't feel like sorting them :) all in all we had a good time, it was worth the money and i got what i sought for; change of scenery and relaxation.